Actions or Hooks?

Both of those should work fine. You need to find an appropriate hook for #1 (it should exist), because you’re looking for changes that happen through interaction with the control panel (although it can also fire off through interaction from the front end if you choose the right hook). #2 sounds like it will be an action that you develop within your module.

From my experience actions are generally used in modules for grabbing form post data on the client and admin side.

Sounds like you’ll need to use hooks when a user creates a new custom field.

Okay, I think I’m getting the hang of things better. Thanks for the reply guys. I spent some time looking Mark Huot’s implementation of the Checkboxes plugin. I see that he implemented an extension for the show_full_control_panel_end hook.

Now, just to be sure I’m understanding things correctly, that hook in particular gets called everytime a form finishes rendering and C=admin is included in the URL. It’s used to do search/replace stuff with the HTML (passed in as $out).

I suppose things could break if the regex patterns weren’t speciifc enough, otherwise you could have your extension modifiying the output of pages that it wasn’t intended for.

Am I getting it?

Thanks again, Mike

You’re in!

Let us know how you development pans out. Are you planning on releasing this for public consumption?

Thanks Brian. Yes, we’ll be releasing anything that could be used by others.. though I might have to clean up some thing. 😊

Cheers, Mike